February 25, 2008; 12:12 am
Lately, the Convergency Room somehow got onto the list of blogs I check daily — perhaps it’s the relative frequency of posts that students are forced to write. Or perhaps I’m bracing myself for the pain that’s yet to come when I eventually take those classes. Or I’m learning what I can in the event that I don’t get in to that sequence.
Of note was this post, by Alex Tribou, regarding a local iPhone news application, currently in the research phase. And I thought to myself, “finally, something here that I might be interested in reading.”
…We’ve coordinated with all of our newsrooms to come up with an idea for a local news application. There will likely still be some tweaking here and there, but we have a pretty solid idea about what we want to do. We continue to try to get into contact with iPhone users, which has been challenging so far. We were not able to get a list of names like we had hoped, so it looks like we’re going to have to spread the word and see what happens. Misty is starting to post our survey so that we can get as much feedback as possible…
Continue reading ‘Oh, convergence’
February 10, 2008; 12:00 am
Update: I’m getting a lot of traffic to this page, thanks to Simon Willison linking to me. (Which, in turn, promoted this post on the Django community RSS feed.)
If you were linked to this page and are interested in reading a bit more of the history of this project and a few technical notes about the new site, you should probably start here.
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We launched Friday morning, with an e-mail to our MizzouIT DNS contact to switch our themaneater.com domain over to the new site.
Of course, we just couldn’t have a flawless launch. The site was slow, the site would break (503 Service Unavailable), and it sucked.
Continue reading ‘themaneater.com Launch’
February 7, 2008; 12:53 am
Over a year and a half since I became involved with the online side of the Maneater, I finally feel that this new site project has fought its way out of the jaws of vaporwaredom. Following one false start after another and over a year of high hopes and dashed dreams, I think we have finally accomplished something.
Without further adieu, here is the current URL at which you can test the new Maneater site:
http://www.themaneater.com/
Continue reading ‘Maneater Open Beta (Lessons Part 4)’
February 3, 2008; 10:48 pm
Through a series of posts, I’m counting down to a public test of the new Maneater web site by the end of the weekend. We’re hoping to launch Tuesday.
This is part three.
This is mostly a technical writeup. For those that aren’t programmers, the final post (Part 4) will be a general “layman’s terms” overview of new features on the site.
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I’m really going to gloss over the templates and views more than I’d like. Honestly, writing the views was more of a Python learning experience than a Django learning experience.
Continue reading ‘Maneater/Django development lessons, Part 3′
February 3, 2008; 6:17 am
Through a series of posts, I’m counting down to a public test of the new Maneater Web site by the end of the weekend. We’re hoping to launch Tuesday.
This is part two.
This is mostly a technical writeup. For those that aren’t programmers, the final post (Part 4) will be a general “layman’s terms” overview of new features on the site.
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Square One
In late December, frustrated with a poor development workflow in Drupal, I mulled it over with Carolina Astrain (our online editor) and decided to go back to Django. I did this on the condition that I could fashion a functional demo in four days or go back to the Drupal project. I promised to have the site (regardless of platform) done by February. A big dare on my part, but necessary in my book: I needed hard deadlines for results. This was getting done whether I liked the workflow or not.
Continue reading ‘Maneater/Django development lessons, Part 2′
